The invention generally relates to computers and computer systems and, in particular, to methods, systems, and computer program products that process online transactions involving the purchase of multiple products.
Modern electronic commerce typically involves the sharing and processing of data across multiple computing systems interconnected by a network. In this environment, transactions that involve multiple product suppliers may result in complex interactions between supplier systems to insure that each product is concurrently priced and available. Systems on the buyer side may also contribute to this complexity by involving multiple forms of payment, each of which may require data processing by one or more bank, payment, or secure transaction computer systems. To support increasingly large input data sets and associated data manipulation tasks, which may be distributed across multiple computing systems, online transaction processing systems require sophisticated transaction management processes. These processes may manage communication between buyer, seller, supplier, and payment systems, and may employ database optimization techniques to enable processing of large numbers of transactions while providing high availability, speed, concurrency, and recoverability of the online transactions.
Thus, improved systems, methods, and computer program products for online transaction processing are needed to improve the accuracy and speed with which online transactions involving the purchase of multiple products are completed.